Re: Moral Naturalism (duplicate of RE "nick" etc.)
Posted by
Russ Abbott on
Jun 21, 2009; 10:27pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Moral-Naturalism-duplicate-of-RE-nick-etc-tp3129709p3130159.html
But as you said, that's not a matter of OK-ness. It's a matter of the evolutionary environment in which the act occurs. In unstable situations (according to the research you site) it is OK. So (I gather) there is no notion of OK as far as you are concerned which is any different from survive-and-reproduce. I can understand the position that says whatever works is right. But that's different from ethics. It's more like saying that there is no point in talking about ethics as a distinct discipline. Perhaps you already said that a while ago.
-- Russ
On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 12:40 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<[hidden email]> wrote:
Russ,
It's not OK, but only because my relatives and friends would kill your relatives and friends if you did. Or, to put the matter more precisely, people who kill other people tend, when social environments are stable, to have had fewer offspring than those that don't. Ditto Rapists. Whenever social environments were unstable (See Death, Hope, and Sex by Jim Chisholm) rapists and murders did better, so alot of human cognitive and social developmental apparatus is devoted to figuring out what sort of a situation each individual is in.
this is the duplicate of a message I sent to the FRIAM list with the (much too large) file attached. Apologies to the list manager who should feel free to kill the version with the attachment.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
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